... compounded by even more serious economic difficulties. The conflict is encouraging the expanding informal economy to play a major role in Syria due to high levels of corruption. The country's civilian infrastructure has not yet been restored, and the sanctions imposed on Damascus by the United States and the EU in particular are hampering economic recovery.
Until 2022, a number of Russian companies were reasonably worried about doing business in Syria because of the risk of Western sanctions. However,...
... even though a restart of flights is currently negotiated.
Second, Georgia began to receive “unpleasant signals” from the European Union. In the European structures, especially in the EuroParliament, Saakashvili retained quite a strong lobby, which ... ... carrot of a “candidate status” as an encouragement. On the other hand, Russia will hardly even notice Georgia’s individual sanctions, whereas Russia’s potential all-out retaliation could be very painful for the small country.
The practice introduced ...
... will certainly be serious technical expertise behind the special envoy’s official statements. It should also be expected that the special envoy will use in his work the expertise of think tanks of the EU, the US and other Western countries. In the European Union itself, the expertise in the field of sanctions has taken a big step forward in the last 20 years, both in application and in the academic sense. Therefore, it is necessary to abandon the capricious moods regarding the newness of EU policy. While lagging far behind the US in terms of experience ...
We can talk about the relative novelty of the sanctions in terms of the number and intensity of the measures applied. However, for a number of qualitative characteristics, they contain patterns that have been well studied in the past
The “sanctions tsunami” against Russia is rightly considered ...
.... They can simply add Russian oil tankers to the lists of blocked ships. Then their service in foreign ports will be significantly hampered. Secondary American sanctions and fines are feared even in friendly countries. The experience of secondary US sanctions being used against the Chinese COSCO Shipping Tanker and some other companies for the alleged transportation of Iranian oil in 2019 can serve as a warning. The European Union has also provided for a mechanism to punish ships carrying Russian oil above the price ceiling. Violating ships will be denied financial, insurance and other services in EU jurisdiction. The wording of paragraph 7 of Art. 3n of EU Council ...
..., the law made it possible to impose sectoral sanctions against companies in the mining, metalworking and railway industries.
Ivan Timofeev:
Sanctions at a Bifurcation Point
The period from 2019 to 2020 is associated with a qualitative expansion of European Union sanctions against Russia. At this time, the EU created new legal mechanisms for the introduction of restrictive measures and applied them against Russian individuals and organizations. This foreshadowed a change in the EU’s approach to sanctions policy ...
... greater extent affect the issues of technology and "dual-use" goods.
The total amount of all payments to the US Treasury amounted to a little over $5.7 billion, $5.3 billion of which was paid by financial sector companies, mainly from the European Union, Switzerland and the UK. The bank
BNP Paribas
paid a record fine - more than $963 million, for violating the US sanctions regimes against Sudan (in force at that time), Iran, Cuba and Myanmar. The bank conducted 3,897 prohibited transactions through US financial institutions. The management was aware of this, which was an aggravating circumstance in this case, ...
... expressed their willingness to allocate funds for the reconstruction of Damascus. Saudi Arabia was also
eyeing
this possibility, despite COVID-19 and the economic fallout. But sanctions have affected the plans of the Arab monarchies. Furthermore, the European Union is in thrall to the U.S. sanctions policy in the new environment. Even if the EU
tried
to lift some of its sanctions in exchange for specific moves by Damascus, Europe would automatically fall under the secondary U.S. sanctions. Thus, the Syrians’ hope for post-war reconstruction ...
... oil and gold sectors in Venezuela or on the oil industry in Iran. Blocking financial sanctions were also combined with more familiar sanctions instruments, including export or import bans.
It would seem that the rapid economic growth of China and the European Union should have interfered with US leadership and reduced the severity of sanctions. However, it turned out that the size of a given economy is not commensurate with possibilities for using it for political purposes. Neither the European Union nor China have yet been able to catch up with the United States in terms of the scale ...
...
Interestingly, the European Union has previously been critical of the American practice of secondary sanctions. A cold shower for Europeans, for example, was the US unilateral withdrawal from the “nuclear deal” with Iran in 2018. Washington renewed its sanctions, while the European Union did not take such a step. However, businesses from EU countries were forced to comply with US law and leave Iran, fearing the same secondary sanctions, which irritated Brussels. There was also concern about the breadth of the American interpretation ...
